Stūpa to Maṇḍala: Tracing a Buddhist Architectural Development from Kesariya to Borobudur to Tabo1 Swati Chemburkar Jnanapravaha, Mumbai INTRODUCTION There were occasions for the direct transfer of Southeast Asian Buddhist developments to India, and there is evidence of at least two specific moments when this occurred. Both instances provide oppor- tunities for a range of interpretative analyses.2 Hiram Woodward, in his “Esoteric Buddhism in Southeast Asia in the Light of Recent Scholarship,” singles out the moment when Bālaputradeva, an exiled scion of the Śailendra dynasty, the builders of the Buddhist Borobudur monument in Central Java, established a 1. This article is based on a paper presented at the conference “Cultural Dialogues between India and Southeast Asia from the 7th to the 16th Centuries” at the K.R. Cama institute, Mumbai, in January 2015. The Kesariya-Borobudur part of this article appears in Swati Chemburkar, “Borobudurs Pāla Forebear? A Field Note from Kesariya, Bihar, India,” in Esoteric Buddhism in Mediaeval Maritime Asia: Networks of Masters, Texts, Icons, ed. Andrea Acri (Singapore: ISEAS, 2016). I owe a special word of thanks to Prof. Tadeusz Skorupski for introducing me to esoteric Buddhism and generously sharing his deep knowledge of texts. I appreciate the critique of my draft by Hiram Woodward and Max Deeg. Despite their feedback, errors may still remain and they are no doubt mine. My sincere thanks to Yves Guichand and Christian Luczanits for graciously providing me the aerial images of the Kesariya stūpa and the layout of Tabo Monastery along with the photos. 2. Hiram Woodward, “Review: Esoteric Buddhism in Southeast Asia in the Light of Recent Scholarship,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 35, no. 2 (2004): 346–347. 169 170 Pacific World, 3rd ser., no. 20 (2018) monastery at Nālandā, Bihar in 850 or 860 CE.3 A verse inscribed on a small stūpa at this monastery is taken from the Bhadracarīpraṇidhāna (Vows of Bodhisattva Samantabhadra). The same text informs the ninth-century reliefs of the topmost galleries at Borobudur.4 To Woodward, this suggests that there were either long-standing similari- ties between Nālandā and central Java or it was Bālaputra’s monastery that brought new emphasis to Nālandā from abroad. Deciding between these two possibilities is not an easy option, and Woodward tends to favor the latter. The new emphasis in design—the circular arrangement of deities in certain numerological configurations on the upper three terraces of Borobudur—appears to reflect a characteristic of theyoginī-tantras that developed at Nālandā in the late eighth to early ninth centuries.5 The distinctive architecture of Borobudur is still being debated. Scholars have looked at Indian prototypes in the ruined stūpa of Nandangarh6 and the partially excavated stūpa of Kesariya7 in Bihar. The unique, almost circular arrangement of deities in the external niches of Kesariya suggests an architectural linkage with Java and the possibility of the new emphasis having some earlier currents in the Buddhist world of Nālandā. 3. Hirananda Sastri’s text of the inscription can be found in “The Nālandā Copper-Plate of Devapāladeva,” Epigraphia Indica 17 (1923–1924): 310–327; and in Hirananda Sastri, Nālandā and Its Epigraphic Material: Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India (Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India, 1942), 95. 4. Gregory Schopen translated the text in “A Verse from the Bhadracarī- praṇidhāna in a 10th Century Inscription Found at Nālandā,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 12 (1989): 149–157. See also Hiram Woodward, “The Life of the Buddha in the Pāla Monastic Environment,” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 48 (1990): 15–17. 5. Ronald Davidson, Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement (1st Indian ed., Delhi: Motilal Banarasidas, 2004), 118, 302. 6. For a detailed account of Nandangarh stūpa and its possible influence on Javanese monuments, see J. E. van Lohuizen-de Leeuw, “South-East Asian Architecture and the Stūpa of Nandangaṛh,” Artibus Asiae 19, nos. 3–4 (1956): 279–290; Joyanto Sen, “The Colossal Stupa at Nandangarh: Its Reconstruction and Significance,”Artibus Asiae 75, no. 2 (2015): 179–220. 7. Based on the overall measurements and the architecture, Caesar Voûte and Mark Long list similarities and differences between Kesariya and Borobudur in Borobudur: Pyramid of the Cosmic Buddha (New Delhi: D. K. Printworld, 2008), 187–191. Chemburkar: Stūpa to Maṇḍala 171 The second historical moment of immediate contact between Southeast Asian Buddhism and India, which Woodward alludes to, came two centuries later. In 1012 CE, a learned Buddhist monk from northeast India went to live in “Śrīvijaya” to study esoteric Buddhism under Dharmakīrti.8 He was born Candragarbha, renamed as Dīpaṃkaraśrījñāna when he entered the sangha, and after initiation into yoginī-tantras he received the name Atīśa. After studying for twelve years somewhere in the maritime federation known as Śrīvijaya, he carried up to Tibet the oldest surviving Śrīvijayan Buddhist commen- tary Durbodhāloka (Illuminating the Unfathomable), composed by his teacher, Dharmakīrti.9 This text, extant only in its Tibetan translation, says that it was written “in the city of Śrīvijaya in Suvarṇadvīpa” under the patronage of the Śailendra monarch Cūḷāmaṇivarman.10 Besides this text, certain concepts regarding inner and outer maṇḍalas were picked up by Atīśa during his Śrīvijayan sojourn and possibly carried to Tibet.11 Among the surviving Buddhist temples of India, Tabo in Himachal displays a complete sculptural maṇḍala of the life-size clay figures of the Vajradhātu Maṇḍala deities. Atīśa visited Tabo in 1042 CE when the 8. Bimalendra Kumar, “Contribution of Ācārya Dharmapāla of Nālandā,” in The Heritage of Nālandā, ed. C. Mani (New Delhi: Aryan Books/Asoka Mission, 2008), 103; B. B. Kumar, “Nālandā: Its Significance,” in ibid., 185. 9. Alka Chattopadhyaya, Atīśa and Tibet: Life and Works of Dipaṃkara Śrījñāna in Relation to the History and Religion of Tibet with Tibetan Sources (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1996), 84–95; Peter Skilling, “Geographies of Intertextuality: Buddhist Literature in Pre-Modern Siam,” Aséanie 19 (2007): 94. 10. J. A. Schoterman, Indonesische Sporen in Tibet (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 185; Peter Skilling, “Dharmakīrti’s Durbodhāloka and the Literature of Śrīvijaya,” Journal of the Siam Society 85, parts 1–2 (1997): 187–194. According to John Miksic, Śrīvijaya could be Palembang, Jambi, Chaiya, or Kedah at different times in the connected maritime Malay world of the peninsula and Sumatra; see Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea 1300–1800 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2013), 110. 11. Alex Wayman, “Reflections on the Theory of Barabudur as a Maṇḍala,” in Barabudur: History and Significance of a Buddhist Monument,ed. Luis O. Gomez and Hiram W. Woodward (Berkeley: Institute of Buddhist Studies, 1981), 140–2; Max Nihom has disputed this in Studies in Indian and Indo-Indonesian Tantrism: Kuñjarakarṇadharmakathana and the Yogatantra (Vienna: De Nobili Institut für Indologie der Universität Wien, 1994), 72n192. 172 Pacific World, 3rd ser., no. 20 (2018) monastery was undergoing major renovation.12 An exactly contempo- raneous set of Vajradhātu Maṇḍala bronzes survives from East Java.13 At the time of Atiśa’s departure from Śrīvijaya, esoteric Buddhist sites sprouted in several parts of Sumatra, especially at Muara Jambi. The majority of temples are in ruins today, but the objects found from the site of Caṇḍi Gumpung contain four vajras and gold sheets from the tenth century inscribing the deities of the Vajradhātu Maṇḍala.14 The Buddhist tradition of Java and Śrīvijaya probably shared many ele- ments. Hudaya Kandahjaya urges us to keep in mind that the Javanese island wasn’t a blank sheet when Sumatra was bustling with Buddhist 12. Deborah Klimburg-Salter et al., Tabo: A Lamp for the Kingdom: Early Indo- Tibetan Buddhist Art in the Western Himalaya (Milan: Skira, 1997), 91, 105. 13. The Nganjuk bronzes, discovered in 1913 and now split between the National Museum Jakarta and other collections and museums around the world, belong almost entirely to the Vajradhātu Maṇḍala described in the eighth-century Sarvatathāgatatattvasaṅgraha and Sarvadurgatipariśodhana- tantra as well as in maṇḍala 19 in the later Niṣpannayogāvalī. Lokesh Chandra (in collaboration with Mrs. Sudarashana Devi Singha), “Identification of the Nanjuk Bronzes” and “The Buddhist Bronzes of Surocolo,” in Cultural Horizons of India: Studies in Tantra and Buddhism, Art and Archaeology, Language and Literature, Vol. 4 (New Delhi: International Academy of Indian Culture and Aditya Prakashan, 1995), 97–107 and 121–147 respectively; Benoytosh Bhattacharya, ed., Niṣpannayogāvalī of Mahapāndita Abhayākaragupta (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1972). 14. The largest concentration of Buddhist sites appeared in Muara Jambi in the eleventh century. See John Miksic, “The Buddhist-Hindu Divide in Premodern Southeast Asia,” Nalanda-Sriwijaya Working Paper Series 1 (2010): 27. S. Nagaraju speculates that Caṇḍi Gumpung was “the principal monastery in the region.” S. Nagaraju, “A Central Sumatran Metropolis at Muara Jambi and Its Buddhist Connection: Some Reflections,” in Śrī Nāgābhinandanam: Dr. M. S. Nagaraja Rao Festschrift, ed. L. K. Srinivasan and S. Nagaraju (Banglore: Dr. M. S. Nagara Rao Felicitation Committee, 1995), 2:750. The gold foil sheets found in ritual deposit boxes in the ruins of Muara Jambi bear the names of five tathāgatas,